Friday, August 08, 2014

The power of words (part IV)

"I tumbled for words at once....There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable." - Dylan Thomas (Notes on the Art of Poetry)

"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is." - José Saramago (Ricardo Reis)

"A word leaves a smoke trail behind it that curls into the past. Every word is surrounded by complex energies. There are meanings underneath a word as well as its obvious meaning. Think of a word as a pendulum instead of a fixed entity. A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations." - Rita Mae Brown (Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual)

"When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness -- I am nothing." - Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape." - Louise Erdrich (The Plague of Doves)

"The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken." - Marguerite Duras (Summer Rain)

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary." - Italo Calvino (The Literature Machine: Essays)

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes (The New Statesman and Nation, July 15, 1933)

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write." - Annie Proulx (The Paris Review, Spring 2009)

"Words should be an intense pleasure, just as leather should be to a shoemaker. If there isn't that pleasure for a writer, maybe he ought to be a philosopher." - Evelyn Waugh (The New York Times, Nov. 19, 1950)

"We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation." - Adrienne Rich (The Best American Poetry 1996, Introduction)

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all." - Richard Wright (Black Boy)

"The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." - Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost." - Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)

"As readers, as writers, as citizens...[we] have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time." - Neil Gaiman (The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2013)

"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." - William Gass (A Temple of Texts)

Comments

The power of words (part IV)

"I tumbled for words at once....There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable." - Dylan Thomas (Notes on the Art of Poetry)

"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is." - José Saramago (Ricardo Reis)

"A word leaves a smoke trail behind it that curls into the past. Every word is surrounded by complex energies. There are meanings underneath a word as well as its obvious meaning. Think of a word as a pendulum instead of a fixed entity. A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations." - Rita Mae Brown (Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual)

"When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness -- I am nothing." - Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape." - Louise Erdrich (The Plague of Doves)

"The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken." - Marguerite Duras (Summer Rain)

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary." - Italo Calvino (The Literature Machine: Essays)

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes (The New Statesman and Nation, July 15, 1933)

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write." - Annie Proulx (The Paris Review, Spring 2009)

"Words should be an intense pleasure, just as leather should be to a shoemaker. If there isn't that pleasure for a writer, maybe he ought to be a philosopher." - Evelyn Waugh (The New York Times, Nov. 19, 1950)

"We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation." - Adrienne Rich (The Best American Poetry 1996, Introduction)

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all." - Richard Wright (Black Boy)

"The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." - Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost." - Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)

"As readers, as writers, as citizens...[we] have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time." - Neil Gaiman (The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2013)

"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." - William Gass (A Temple of Texts)

Myth & Moor

by Terri Windling

I'm a writer, artist, and book editor interested in myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the ways they are used in contemporary arts. I workin the New York publishing industry but I live in aDevon village at the edgeof Dartmoor with my English husband, dramatist & puppeteer Howard Gayton, our daughter, Victoria Windling-Gayton, and a joyful hound named Tilly (a Springer Spaniel/Labrador cross).

The 37th International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts: I'm delighted to be Guest of Honor in 2016 along with writer Holly Black and fairy tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega. ICFA is held annually in Orlando, Florida in March. Further information on the 37th conference will be posted soon.

Other events in 2016 are still being confirmed, so please check back.

Take a stroll through our village (and its environs) by visiting my neighbors' blogs & sites:

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth...the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times." - Gary Snyder

"People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand - what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for - Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.” - Terry Tempest Williams

"This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories." - Ben Okri

"Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion." - Barry Lopez

Bookshelf

The Wood Wife:A mythic novel set in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. This link goes to the US edition; a UK edition is available here; and the new French edition is here. (For those who might be interested, I did a Q-&-A session on the book over on the Good Reads site.) Winner of the Mythopoeic Award.

Welcome to Bordertown:The latest volume in a classic Urban Fantasy series for YA readers. (An Audie Award nominee, for the audio book edition.) For information on the previous books, visit the Bordertown website.)

All told, I've published over forty books for children, teenagers and adults. More information on my writing, editing, and art can be found on my website.

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Please note that these books are linked to Amazon because it's the only book linking system that Typepad (this blogging service) has,but I urge you to please support your local bookstore if you plan to purchase any of the books mentioned on this blog.

Links to:

The Endicott StudioThe nonprofit organization for Mythic Arts that I ran for 22 years (starting in 1986), co-directed with author & folklorist Midori Snyder. The organization is currently on hiatus (while we catch our breaths and make a living), but a great deal of material from our Journal of Mythic Arts archive remains online.

Interstitial ArtsEllen Kushner, Delia Sherman, & other good folk look at writing and art in the interstices between genres. I was one of the founding board members, and remain an enthusiastic supporter.